Good Things out of Nazareth

by Flannery O'Connor

  The enclosed will show you that Thomas is not of general appeal. I think she is right; anyway, I follow, as you do too, the negative outlook on a story before it is published and the positive after. So I will put up “The Comforts of Home” until I can decide some better way to end it. I think this bears out your feeling about the gun; only it was more than the gun. I also find the Partridge story impossible. It seems almost too slight to work on but is really better as a peanut festival but I will probably sack it, even as that. You can’t turn out stories like corn from a hot popper or that is what you will have—corn.

  I like Carol [Johnson] and think she is very intelligent. Ashley [Brown] thinks she is shy but I don’t much think so. I think she is just wrapped up in herself and her own work. Most of us are. I am myself; but being a Southerner, I have the manners to counteract it, and she being a mid-westerner is almost devoid of these necessary manners. For instance, in writing to say she had a nice time, she did not mention my mother. Who really had the brunt of it. This is not bad manners, just a lack of manners. The touch of the convent is still on her. Occasionally I would look at her, and she would be looking straight ahead, alone in the room full of people, as if the wimple, or whatever that veil is that blinkers them, were invisibly on her. There is a kind of self-centeredness peculiar to those in religious orders, where their main business is to think of their own soul and where everything is ordered around them to that end. She did more talking when you had her by herself. But after four days of them, I was pretty well shot.

  We had a note from Billy [Sessions] declaring himself to be in delicate health. I’m glad he met you regardless of his motives. When he was here, my mother gave him a lecture on thinking about himself too much, and in his note he said he had found a quotation from St. John of the Cross to help him counter that tendency: Disquietude is vanity. Billy is a peculiar combination of high intelligence and ridiculous personality. The only case like it I know.

  I had a letter from my Longman’s editor in London wanting to know what was the significance of Tarwater’s violation in the woods. This is very depressing and a hint of things to come.

  Excelsior,

  Flannery

  * * *

  The letter concerns news and observations among mutual friends. Echoes of O’Connor’s stories are present in her mother providing counsel about marriage. Such wisdom plays a significant role in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Good Country People,” “The Displaced Person,” and other stories.

  MILLEDGEVILLE

  7 JANUARY 60

  Dear Betty,

  Well that play may not have been any worse than the others, but at least in the others there were one or two characters that Billy [Sessions] knew something about—such as the colored woman in the first one; but he don’t know anything about tycoons and revolutionaries. I told him it might be good for him if he took some historical incident from around South Carolina and made a play out of it, such as Warren [Robert Penn] did in Brother to Dragons. It seems to me that this would furnish some discipline for his imagination; he would have something to check himself by.

  By all means bring that lady with you. We’d enjoy her. You name the day.

  You will be innerested to know that I am on page 245 of Rememberance of Things Past [Marcel Proust], and that I have a special bed-table to put it on, one of Miss Mary’s cast off possessions, as I am too lazy to hold it up. I like it a lot better than I thought I would.

  I’m not making much progress on my story as I am nauseated in the morning with this new medicine. It makes you that way until your system gets used to it, which they say takes about two months. I am less enthusiastic about all things when nauseated.

  The African contingent here celebrated the holidays by staying drunk throughout them.

  I think my mother is less convinced that Billy, “that prize package,” as she calls him, is any less silly than always. She counseled him at length about his matrimonial desires. He averred that he would make some woman a very good husband. My mother told him he would run any woman crazy in short order. I was particularly irritated by his telling my mother about that vulgar drawing that Robie Macauley stuck on my story in the Fall Kenyon [Review]. I thought it was sickening and thought it just as well she didn’t see it, but as soon as he left, she said he had shown it to her. She was insensed over the drawing. So was I but thought it best to forget it, but she reinsensed me to the extent that I wrote Robie a letter about it. To do Billy [William Sessions] justice, he probably thought she knew about it, but that does not lessen my irritation.

  I’m glad you gave up the Great Books if it was going to interfere with your writing what you’re writing. Otherwise, I think it would have been a good thing.

  Well cheers,

  Flannery

  * * *

  As O’Connor advises in other letters, writing by a Catholic convert does not have to be specifically religious. She hopes Hester will visit by traveling with their mutual friend. In meeting journalists and critics, O’Connor compares herself to a character in her own novel.

  MILLEDGEVILLE

  13 FEBRUARY 60

  Dear Betty,

  I would not give any thought to the fact that your novel does not express your convictions as a Catholic. The convert does not get to experience his convictions in the years that experience forms the imagination, so it is quite right that what you will reflect is your need; that is right and that is enough. In the other things you have written it may have been an attempt to express your now-convictions that marred the writing. This sounds like a highly interesting book and I await it with sympathy.

  The enclosed (Penguin thing) was sent me by yclept Sessions with instructions to indicate what I want. I don’t [want] anything but to be polite [so] I have marked the Hopkins poems. In his letter he indicates that he will spend the day on some Saturday in February which I am to designate. I am designating the 27th and suggesting that he bring you if he is coming from Atlanta. Your presence will take the curse off him (how awful we speak of our saintly Billy) and will also deter him from getting a weak spell toward 5 and feeling that he cannot make it to Atlanta that night. If he is not coming from Atlanta, why don’t you come down on the bus or if you would rather come on a Saturday when he is not coming, come the next Saturday. Any Saturday will do but the 19th of March. Another thought is that if he is coming from the monastery [Monastery of the Holy Spirit], you could take the bus to Conyers [Georgia] and let him meet your there????

  Thursday Time sent two men down here from Atlanta, one to take pictures and the other to ask questions sent from the NY office—so they are intending to do something with it and we shall wait patiently to see what. The man took about a million pictures, in all of which I am sure I looked like Bishop [character, The Violent Bear It Away]. They will select the one [that] looks most like Bishop. Apparently there is a very favorable review in the February Catholic World by the Medieval Studies man at Boston University. I haven’t seen it. And Granville Hicks is writing something favorable about it for the Saturday Review. So there will at least be a mixture.

  We hear no more about the scientist who may have done in Rosie.

  After the interview with the Time man I am very much aware of how hard you have to try to escape labels. He wanted me to characterize myself so he would have something to write down. Are you a Southern writer? What kind of Catholic are you? Etc. I asked him what kinds of Catholics there were. Liberal or conservative, says he. All I did for an hour was stammer and stutter and all night I was awake answering his questions with the necessary qualifications and reservations. Not only will look like Bishop but will sound like him if he could talk.

  Cheers,

  Flannery

  * * *

  O’Connor praises Betty’s excellent fiction that deserves pu
blication. The influence of O’Connor’s writing tutor, Caroline Gordon, is evident in O’Connor’s suggestion for more details to improve the novel’s setting.

  MILLEDGEVILLE

  7 MARCH 60

  Dear Betty,

  This is in my opinion a HOWLING success. If this fails to get published I will lose my faith in American publishers. If it is not published for the right reasons, it will surely be published for the wrong. I am going to write E. [Elizabeth McKee] and tell her I have read it and that I think it is a sure thing.

  This is certainly your medium. This one is much much better than the other, very sure in every way—well paced, dramatic, and a fine control throughout of the language. If I had known when I started marking things that it was going to be this good throughout, I wouldn’t have marked it up because you could have sent it to E. like it is. The things I have marked are details only, matters of syntax or grammar or an occasional image that seemed out of tone, usually too exuberant for the occasion.

  There is one thing you might think of, though if you don’t I don’t think it will make too much difference. That is that there is not much sense of the town that surrounds the brown-sugar house. In a story like this you want to do everything that will add to the reality of characters who are extreme. I thought it was probably a small town until the airport came in and then I began to think it might be a city. A sentence, a paragraph here and there would clear this up and add to the substantialness of things. In this college town, (Milledgeville), if a member of the faculty made a suicide attempt with the reek of Liquor on him he would soon be at some other college. You had better make it plain that this man can’t be dispensed with because of his academic attainments or something. Academic reputation would keep him there, nothing else. They will put up with the worst teachers if they have published a book. All you got to do is assure us he’s published a book. All this sense of what surrounds them, of the real people who surround them needs to be suggested.* (This may give you an idea of why there is a deputy in my story). It wouldn’t take much to do this, and I do feel it would improve it. But it is fine, really fine.

  My heartiest cheers,

  Flannery

  PS That mountain man riding by in the wagon at break of day is Turriffic. Every now and then I paused in sheer admiration, but nothing else could stop me from reading.

  *suggested only.

  * * *

  O’Connor is perplexed about the rejection of her friend’s novel by a publisher and suggests the agent might reveal the reason why. As in previous letters, echoes of O’Connor’s stories emerge in a literary award she received. “Brenda Star” resembles June Star of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and the young woman giving the award is reminiscent of “Joy/Hulga” in “Good Country People.”

  MILLEDGEVILLE

  28 MAY 60

  Dear Betty,

  That is strange to me that they wouldn’t handle that novel. Did they give any indication why? I don’t know the Minor girl and don’t know Mavis except for a few business dealings. Anyway, wait and see what Elizabeth [McKee] says, not that I think she has any literary judgment, but she might tell you WHY they won’t send it around. It is well written and to me it was not offensive. I sometimes think I must be pretty callus to what is offensive to other people. However, I don’t know as I would have shown it to your librarian friend; but I’d be interested to know what she thought.

  Miss OBD didn’t ask me what I thought of her novel; had she, I was going to tell her the beautiful truth: I haven’t read it. I did read the first chapter but the part does not stand for the whole. OBD and her mother are quire unbelievable. If I had created them, I would have to scratch them all out. There is no combination quite like innocence and gall.

  You are right about Billy [Sessions]. Lord, give me a little of your charity.

  No, don’t have Dr. S. to supper. You’d be bored to tears probably and want to heave him out the window. He is just something that, like all the letters, I would like you to be in on. You will run up on him some time or other possibly. Sent you the Jung book. I found it fairly exasperating, though I have read Jung in the past and like him better. Some journalism fraternity in Atlanta awarded me something called The Brenda, named after, I regret to say, Brenda Star, Girl Reporter, a character out of the funny paper. Anyway, I did not go up there to receive the thing but Betsy Fancher went and accepted it for me, so I had to ask the ladies of the journalism fraternity to come down for tea for to bring the object. Last Saturday ten of them came, mostly it seems fashion editors with the exception of Marjorie Rutherford and the Brigadier General Editor of the Salvation Army War Cry. The latter was kind of five by five and wore the skirt of her uniform and a white shirt and those stockings that the elastic ends below the knees. The object was of gilded concrete, a naked girl reporter holding up a scroll against a background of their fraternity letters. As soon as they left, I wrapped it up in a newspaper and do not intend to look at it again.

  I had a letter from the Sister today wanting to know when I was coming up there. I see there’ll be no escaping her. Apparently the Bishop is much interested in this too. He delivered the child’s funeral oration.

  Cheers or something,

  Flannery

  * * *

  O’Connor praises her friend’s writing once again and places her among the masters of American literature. Nobel Prize winner, William Faulkner, once observed he was just writing about “people.” O’Connor notes Hester does the same. Drawing on her own rootedness in Dante’s writing techniques, O’Connor reveals Hester’s stories are similarly anchored in the Florentine.

  MILLEDGEVILLE

  6 JUNE 60

  Dear Betty,

  This is wonderful, much better than the other stories, more natural and more concerned with what stories are concerned with—people. I also have the sense that you enjoyed writing it in a way you didn’t enjoy the others; and all that shows. I have no advice on it at all except you take out words here and there and you redo a sentence in it that isn’t grammatical. I also suggested you leave out the sentence about the nurse in his room but that’s not important. I would type this over and start sending it out. Just for the heck of it send it to The New Yorker. I don’t think they will take it, but just send it and see what they say. I am sure you could get it published at once at some place like The Georgia Review in Athens, which would not be bad, but I would just try the other as you have nothing to lose. You might even try Esquire, which has become a literary magazine I am told by Ashley [Brown], and is read in all the best barber shops. I may try them on that Partridge deal which I have written over as an Azalea Festival and got the mater’s approval of; but now I don’t like it myself. I don’t know what I’ll do about it.

  Of course, you could send this to Elizabeth [McKee] and get her to send it around but I would wait and be sure she’s there. I’d like her and those other two to see it. Every communication I have had from Miss Minor has irritated me.

  As soon as I finish reading it to review for the Bully Tin I will send you CHRIST AND APOLLO [William F. Lynch, S.J.] which will tell you what you have already done just discovered apparently by yourself. This story illustrates CHRIST AND APOLLO to perfection. Your other stories were written by the univocal imagination; now you have written one using the analogical imagination. Wait’ll you read the book and you will see what I’m talking about.

  Send this to Billy [Sessions] and see if he don’t agree with me, that this story is the best.

  I told him I wanted him to be picking out a Saturday to bring you and him down. If he don’t, come by yourself. If you would like to meet M.[aurice-Edgar] Coindreau [French translator] come on June 18.

  Cheers,

  F

  * * *

  This is a serial letter involving items of
interest. O’Connor and Hester react to a play written by William Sessions. O’Connor encourages Hester to come over from Atlanta when Mr. Coindreau, the translator of Faulkner’s stories into French, plans to visit O’Connor. She perhaps senses Hester will understand the significance of the translation of O’Connor’s stories into French.

  MILLEDGEVILLE

  11 JUNE 60

  Dear Betty,

  Why don’t you just send that story to The Atlantic and to Harper’s and to Esquire and to the Sat. Eve. Post while you are at it? As soon as you get it back from one send it to the next. A note from Miss Minor informs me that Elizabeth will be back June 20 so maybe eventually you’ll hear from her.

  Yesterday Billy’s opus arrived in the mail with a dollar bill attached to it. Instructions are to send it on to you when I finish with it. I am in medias res now with no opinion yet.

  No the dog-book lady didn’t come. I talked to her once about the award over the telephone but I never know who I’m talking to on the telephone and not until I hung up did I realize she was the dog-book lady. She sounded like a good old girl.

  My opinion of Bud has gone up I must say. Some of his columns had struck me as efforts to be cute. Which they probably were but anyway it is consoling to know that he has to make an effort to be cute and isn’t just naturally cute. I have hopes for the Messenger’s future. There was a nice paragraph about TVBIA [The Violent Bear It Away] in the last Partisan Review in the Fiction Chronicle by a man I respect, R. W. Flint. He didn’t say much but what he said was ok. The reviews get more favorable the farther away they are from publication date. This is as it should be.